And so it was Sunday

Today was day two of my two-week vacation, though as it’s still the weekend, I’m not sure how much it should count. Mostly all I did today was join my weekly writing group, where, with a little prompt, I came up with this:

The vampire loved going to the mall during the Christmas holidays. Not for the reasons you might expect, since he had given up on human blood almost a century earlier, when there was just an open field where the mall now stood, and he found no joy in the thought of so many warm morsels pushed together, jostling for the holiday sales and reeking of the iron tang his taste buds knew so well. In his youth, when he was more enamored with the hunt, or in that dark, dry period in Madrid several hundred years later, when he would have died for even a small sip of pulsing red — then this mass of people, such easy pickings, like low-hanging fruit, might have warmed his unbeating heart. But none of that was what drew him here now. He loved this time of year, and at the crowded mall especially, simply because it reminded him of Magnus, the vampire who had sired him, and it allowed him a few small moments when he might almost convince himself that the other man was still alive.

He had no real confirmation that Magnus was dead, it was true, and indeed Magnus himself would have disputed the claim even if someone had been able to produce a body. “When you’ve seen death cheated as many times as I have,” he might have said, “you start to doubt it at every turn.”

But the vampire knew what he had seen, and he had not seen Magnus alive since that day.

Christmas Eve, 1857, Sarajevo. Not an especially auspicious year, but nor as dire as some that he and the rest of his kind had endured over the centuries. Only that summer he, Magnus, and a woman whose name he could no longer remember — Isabelle? — had been hunted across half of Europe. He had only narrowly avoided the stake himself one foggy night in Budapest. But now they had escaped, achieved a brief moment of calm and respite on this snowy evening, and Magnus was enthralling them beside the fireplace with details of his newly hatched Grand Scheme.

“I at last understand the secret of true happiness,” he told them both — and, in his clearly drunken state, to anyone else in the tavern who wandered into his orbit. “But the only path that leads to it also rounds past death. So it would take a madman to make such an attempt.”

Magnus was, it would soon be clear, such a madman.

I’m not entirely sure where it’s headed, but I had fun writing this much.